Self-Paced High School American Literature

This concise survey of American literature begins with folk-tales from the indigenous people of North America. In the American Literature Class, we will read poetry from the colonial period, as well as some writings by founding fathers. We’ll cover some of the earliest American writers -- Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne -- before more poetry and a sampling of 20th Century writers, ending with a late 20th Century novel. See course book list below.  

For this self-paced class:

• Students have access to recorded lectures from their course and can choose which books to read and in what order.
• Students will have access to weekly reading pacing guides and auto-grade quizzes.
• This class does not include live class sessions or teacher support.
• All recordings will be available from September 2 through the end of the following August.

Book List

There are many options for acquiring these books. You can order them from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or another online retailer. If you want to save money, you can check them out of the library. For most of them, you can get e-book versions or access them online and read them on your computer screen. (For any required reading not on the list, we will provide online versions.) 

• The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
• The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Go Down, Moses, by William Faulkner
• The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
• The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin
• Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
• Peace Like a River, by Leif Enge